


like sunrise, cutting through the night

by coalitiongirl



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Past Abortion, Swan-Mills Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-18
Updated: 2014-07-02
Packaged: 2018-02-05 05:24:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1806871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coalitiongirl/pseuds/coalitiongirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emma hurts like a hurricane, hurtling devastation in every direction and spinning through life, refusing to dwell and leaving little lasting damage and then she’s gone, vanished from the room with nothing but silence in her wake. She doesn’t ask about the doctor this time, doesn’t seek to <i>find another way</i>, and she doesn’t look at Regina at all. She speaks to Henry at dinner and Regina sits rigidly in her seat and then she disappears into the night and doesn’t return in the morning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Mentions of past marital rape and [probably not very safe] abortions.
> 
> [sixspades](http://sixspades.tumblr.com/) sent me this headcanon one morning and I had to write it (still not sure if I'm grateful or angry about it, lol).

When they first talk to Whale, Emma is bright and excited and Regina is knotting her fingers together and trying not to throw up. _We’re going to do this your way_ , Emma had insisted, and she’s talking about it now, discussing fertility treatments and donors and all the other options they have while Whale casts sidelong glances at her. _I did the last one, now it’s your turn_ , Emma had joked, and Regina had been pale and lifeless and fading away with the wind, thinning and thinning until she’s only paper and feathers and ungrounded.

 

Whale doesn’t say anything but Regina croaks, “I don’t…I don’t think we should do this.”

 

“A donor?” Emma nods. “I don’t love the idea, but you said that trying with magic is too risky and I don’t want to–” 

 

“No.” She clears her throat. “I don’t want to have a baby.” 

 

And Emma shatters just as Regina had known she would, face breaking into a mosaic of hurt and confusion and _I thought this was both of us. I thought we were going somewhere good_. 

 

She’d first whispered it one night as though it had been something to be ashamed of, as though she’d never thought that it might be on Regina’s mind, thrumming through her with every day spent together. With every time she looks at Emma and thinks, _we could be like this forever_. 

 

They can’t do this magically, Regina assures her, and then Emma does _research_ and pores over Rumple’s old books with Belle for days, finding out all the details of how they can. And Rumple calls her twice and asks her, _When are you going to tell her?_ as though he’s never been a part of this. And then it’s possible magically, yes, but Regina knows that there are risks and she didn’t want to think about them, don’t you understand? She doesn’t want anything to go wrong.

 

She doesn’t want to take a test and see that sign and know that this is a dream that will end just like the others, to see blood everywhere and be sick with disgust and horror and relief. She doesn’t want Emma to see blood when she looks at her, blood in her eyes in her veins in her abdomen, pulsing outward and screaming just as she had.

 

She’d been nineteen and twenty and twenty-one and twenty-two and empty, empty, staring at the ceiling and begging the fairy godmothers who have never seen her to keep her empty. She’d been nineteen and twenty and twenty-one and twenty-two and huddled on a chair and Rumple is amused at her pleas, shaking his head, _I may not know the precise circumstances but you’re destined for an important child, Regina, and I won’t undo that_. She’d been nineteen and twenty and twenty-one and twenty-two and her maid had quietly summoned a woman from town to the castle and returned to the room later with hot rags and tea.

 

She’d trusted no one and she’d trusted all the wrong people and she’d been wild and desperate and sick at the thought of _him_ and _his child_ and she’d vomited again and again until she’d been coughing up blood and her maid had sat silently with her, silvery eyes weary and all too knowing.

 

Emma had asked her to marry her once, and she’d been joking but not really and Regina had laughed and pretended she hadn’t realized.

 

Emma hurts like a hurricane, hurtling devastation in every direction and spinning through life, refusing to dwell and leaving little lasting damage and then she’s gone, vanished from the room with nothing but silence in her wake. She doesn’t ask about the doctor this time, doesn’t seek to find _another way_ , and she doesn’t look at Regina at all. She speaks to Henry at dinner and Regina sits rigidly in her seat and then she disappears into the night and doesn’t return in the morning.

 

Her maid had been an older woman, kindly but firm, and her eyes had been just the same color as Mother’s. She’d been petrified and reassured by her all at once, and only once the sun had come out the first morning after had she spoken. _You are not the first queen to refuse this._ She’d watched the blood drip down onto the rags on the bed and thought about loving the king’s spawn and been glad for the blood and been ashamed.

 

Snow White had insisted on visiting her quarters, on seeing her beloved stepmother, and when Regina's maid had warded her off one time too many, she’d complained to her father and the maid had been dismissed. Regina had received Snow with blankets over her legs and the rags beneath them and smiled, smiled, smiled until she'd thought her lips might crack open her skin until it all peeled off and left nothing but an empty shell beneath it.

 

Emma insists on nothing, and when she’s in pain she turns it all within. And this time it’s Snow White who stops her, who opens the door and says guardedly, “She doesn’t want to talk to you,” and Regina gives her a quelling glare and stalks past her up to Emma’s old room.

 

Emma is staring out the window, knees pulled up her chin and hair hanging loose around her face, and she says, “You could have told me. If you didn’t want one. I wouldn’t have…you didn’t need to lie just to make me happy.”

 

An unconscious hand slides onto her stomach. “I wasn’t lying.”

 

Emma waits and she can’t say anything more. Her pulse is so loud in her ears that it drowns out the sound of Snow eavesdropping downstairs, of a tabletop fan buzzing on Emma’s dresser, of the low breaths that Emma had been taking, short and abrupt.

 

She leaves the loft, head high and neck stiff and she doesn’t cry until she’s in the shower, hands pressed to the tiles in front of her and water hot enough to burn. Her skin is red and raw and her eyes are the same and Emma isn’t there anymore, is somewhere across town and she’s lost another love to the shadows of her past, dark claws snaking out to snatch away every good thing she clings to.

 

She exits the bathroom and Emma is sitting on her bed, eyes wide as she stares at Regina. “What the hell happened to you?” She clambers up, tearing the comforter off the bed to wrap it around Regina and guide her to their bed, sliding in beside her to hold her close. And Emma is rough fabric and calloused leather and jeans against her still-sensitive skin but she’s home and Regina buries herself in her, clings to her and weeps silent tears into red leather as Emma’s hands pat awkwardly at her back.

 

“I don’t know, Regina. I don’t know what I did wrong,” Emma’s saying, and she raises her face to stare up at the other woman in confusion. “I don’t know how to make it right if you won’t tell me.” Emma’s eyes are bloodshot, too, and she’s trembling against Regina’s skin and she’s swallowing back words that Regina knows will be  _not good enough, not a family,_ a dozen fears specific to Emma Swan.

 

And she whispers, “Uterine rupture,” and sits up, gathering the blanket around her. 

 

“What?”

 

“That’s what Whale says is most likely, if I carry a child. There’s too much-“ She chokes on the words and tries again. “Too much internal scarring. The odds of a baby surviving would be…not high.” She’s had years where nothing has been fair, where she’d been ruined and where she’d been ruining, and yet nothing feels quite as spiteful a turn of fate as this.

 

Emma is staring at her, uncomprehending. “Why didn’t you say?” 

 

And there’s such a simple solution that she knows that Emma will see only that and not the path to it, not the way it branches out into a dozen different points of agony that aren’t fair at all. But Emma’s hands are drawing lines on her back and she doesn’t ask about the scarring, doesn’t ask about every time Regina had been young and helpless with bruised thighs and the stirrings of something corrupted and terrifying growing within her. 

 

Emma's eyes are wet and far too intuitive and she’s underestimated her again, has seen her pain as a tunnel guarded on all sides and never noticed the windows to outside. Not quite casting sunbeams inside, but lightening the black to grey. Enough to see if you search hard enough.

 

But Emma doesn’t say anything about what she’s seen inside that tunnel, doesn’t ask about Snow’s father or about scarred tissue or about youngafraidalone Regina. She doesn’t strip Regina of dignity and she doesn’t force out memories and she’s only silent and aware.

 

She sheds her jacket and shirt and holds out her arms, and Regina fits right into them, skin on skin and nothing between them. Nothing ever between them. And then Emma murmurs, “Adoption.”

 

“What?” 

 

“We could adopt a baby. No more mine or yours, no blood connections, just _ours_.” And it’s a fear she hasn’t even placed yet that Emma’s rushed to allay, another child in Emma’s womb who might turn to her one day, _You’re not my mother, you’re not my real mom, you don’t love me_. 

 

But she isn’t fading away anymore. She’s solid and thick and _real_ and there are no closed doors, no more quiet rooms where there are only blankets to seal her from the world in paltry form. Skin on skin and nothing between them. “We could,” she whispers. “But.” Emma’s just the right size for her, not towering above her and dangerous and holding all the power in the world.

 

Lips at the edge of her forehead where it touches her hair. “But?”

 

“I trust you.” She thinks of babies growing in stables and little cottages out in the woods, of babies growing in a castle with a mother who couldn’t bear to look at them. She thinks of Henry, toddling through the only home she’d ever built and she thinks of Emma beside her and she says again, “I trust you.” 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought a lot about writing a story about Regina and motherhood after the first ficlet and then instead a fic about Emma and what that means to her came out instead so I am joining it to the first. (I would not be surprised if a Regina one emerged too sometime in the future.)

When the nurse holds out the baby to Emma, she’s shaking her head before she can even process, before she can see anything more than a shock of brown hair and pink skin and tiny wrinkled fingers poking up out of the blanket. “No,” she says firmly. “Regina first.”

 

“We recommend skin-on–“ 

 

“I know. Just…first Regina.” She’s thought about this rationally a dozen times, considered lying there cradling this child while Regina looks on and it feels _wrong_ , feels like the world is too small and condensed to the tiny space between her and six pounds eight ounces of _her_. And she’s tiny and Emma hasn’t seen her eyes yet and she doesn’t know if they’re blue or green or brown and if they can look out and see a world beyond them.

 

And when Regina is holding the baby then the world grows a little bit more and she isn’t suffocated anymore. And Henry and her parents are a room away and she can see the door and she can breathe and Regina is staring down at the baby and her lips are parted and she’s _connected_ in an instant because Regina is a mother, through and through. Tears are spilling down Regina’s face and she’s ducking away as though Emma shouldn’t see them even though they’re her lifeline. She reaches out to trace them, to draw lines of saltwater against Regina’s cheeks and to press it to her own.

 

Emma remembers holding Henry after he’d been born and she imagines that it would have changed her mind in an instant, that she would have seen his little face and known that she could be his. She only has her imagination because it’s all a lie and she doesn’t think that she would have thought that at all, that she wouldn’t have been terrified and handed him right back over because he’d been so small and so helpless and she doesn’t know how to take care of things so they don’t break, break, fall from her grasp and shatter into pieces on the floor.

 

And she walks barefoot and alone, cutting up her soles and her soul until she leaves a trail behind. 

 

Regina knows about breaking things and she knows about Emma but her eyes are still watery and bright as she moves the blanket and opens Emma’s hospital gown to place the baby down on her chest. She doesn’t move her hand from the baby’s back as they position Emma just right for nursing and Emma’s– 

 

disconnected, staring down vaguely and thinking, _You kicked so much and now you don’t move_. Silent baby, pulling in painful sucks from her breasts and Regina is kissing her brow and staring down and she focuses on lipsticked mouths that whisper love and trust and not the child whose eyes she hasn’t seen.

 

She calls her little brother Bae and Henry’s father Neal and it’s all simpler when she can separate the two and not think about how she’d wished a boy named Neal away. She can’t wish Bae away because he’s all her parents had ever wanted and now they finally have it thirty years after their daughter was born. And she wants them to be happy and she can't wish Bae away because missed chances and destiny being a bitch had been Neal’s domain, not his.

 

If Henry had been born in Canada to two anonymous former thieves he’d have been more mature and less so, hard and guarded and angry because nothing would have fit and she wouldn’t have been enough for him. And now she’d thought that she’d wanted another child.

 

She’s lain in bed four nights out of seven and stared down at her stomach as it shifts and bulges and now she’s staring down and there’s brown hair and scrunched up eyes and she can see a delicately formed ear, like clay molded into something living. And she still doesn’t know how to be a mother.

 

They’ve agreed not to call her Cora, for various reasons that have them both tentative and uncomfortable and hesitant to explain, and Regina had curled up against her halfway down her body that night and held onto her so tightly that memories of dozens of childhood memories are excised that night.

 

Neal and Cora and their first chances for family stolen away while they’d stood by with smiles on their faces and promises of a future dancing before their eyes. And Emma suggests a new name in the morning and Regina shakes her head but then later that day they’re at the doctor and staring at the sonogram and she murmurs, _Selena, not Zelena. She can become who she wants to be._ And that’s all right.

 

But the baby is six pounds eight ounces and Selena is so many syllables and so permanent and who the hell decided that she would be capable of forcing a name on a baby?

 

Sometimes she wishes she hadn’t been given memories of raising Henry. (Sometimes she loves them more than anything in the world because they’re _Regina_ and that matters more than fiction.) They’re empty, memories without emotions, and they can’t fabricate motherhood or competence or her heart swelling three sizes bigger. They can’t erase loneliness and regrets and the way her heart had stopped in her throat at _My name’s Henry. I’m your son_ and ten years gone with a single slam of the front door to her apartment.

 

Her heart is stopped now, too, but it feels like it’s shrinking into something tight and hard, like a bullet in her mouth. It’s ready to dislodge and be coughed out into her hand, to be nothing at all and displayed for everyone to see. And there’s a baby sleeping against her skin and she’s warm and she’s warm and there are no more bullets anymore. There’s no place where she can be dangerous and unfocused and hearts are bloody and now there’s a baby who won’t accept her just because of a curse and a clause written into it.

 

She’d wondered that first year if Henry would have loved her if he'd known she wasn’t a hero. If true love’s kiss would have worked at all after he’d experienced her as she is. She wonders if she’ll ever have the courage to cast aside the title that makes her something more than a little blonde girl with two names that mean hurt and pain and _our best chance_. 

 

And then one day she’d been _Miss Swan_ and it had been cold and fierce and she’d been an equal. She’d been a threat and she’d been an enemy and she’d felt alive within it. And then _Miss Swan_ had become _Emma_ and cold eyes had warmed and the fierceness had been scraping teeth and nails and panting and _I love you, I love you, I love you_ a thousand times whispered against her skin. 

 

She’s only been her names and never been the savior to the one she’d been meant to vanquish, the one beside her halfway on the narrow bed with her and there are three of them together, mother mother daughter and a son waiting to come inside. Mother mother just two girls who’d grown up wrong.

 

“We can do this,” Regina whispers, though Emma hadn’t spoken aloud. “We have each other. I won’t be...” Her voice trails off and Emma knows the old insecurities, knows what motherhood to a girl has meant to Regina- tormented and forced and a prison and not _her own_ \- and Emma shivers against her.

 

 _I don’t know what I’m going to be_ , she doesn’t say, but Regina’s hand slides into hers and she sighs so deeply that the baby shifts in her sleep, Regina-colored hair moving an inch over toward their locked fingers.

 

Mary Margaret rocks Bae to sleep every night and sings to him when she doesn’t know that Emma’s watching, soft lullabies that sound like home. Not Emma’s home. Emma’s home sounds like a teenaged boy warbling Nicki Minaj choruses in the shower and Operation Phoenix which is apparently about getting extra TV on date nights. Emma’s home sounds like whisks chiming against mixing bowls and frustrated noises about boots in the foyer and a queen with an arsenal of expletives sixty years long when she’s inside her. Emma’s home is going to sound like tinny Mozart-playing mobiles and whispering at eleven in the morning and arguments in the middle of the night about whose turn it is to get up.

 

She doesn’t know this baby and she doesn’t know how to be a mother but she knows what it feels like without both. She knows being alone and she knows no one counting on you and she knows watching the walls and the ceiling and everything but the baby boy being carried out of the room. She knows drinking a potion and waking up to a world where all she is is smoke and mirrors.

 

She doesn’t know the song that Regina is crooning to the baby now, high and low like the whisper of wings and promises and _I trust you_. It’s the same thread over and over and Emma catches it, threads it into the heart made small at her throat until it unravels and falls back into place. 

 

She’s humming and she doesn’t notice until the door opens and the room comes alive, and there are her parents with their shining faces and the love she’s never quite known what to do with. And there is Henry with his eyes like her own had been when Mary Margaret had first sung to Bae.

 

She reaches for him and he blinks hard and something erupts between them, something savage like an open wound and burning like the sutures clamping it shut. Something that makes him lurch closer and then he’s on her other side and she slides an arm around him and it’s all different now but there’s Henry and he wants to be hers.

 

And in a single shining moment, that’s exactly what he is. _Theirs._ She leans into Regina and Regina leans into her and Henry curls up beside them- beside his family, his home, his mothers- and there’s a baby resting against her skin, half hidden under the flaps of her hospital gown. And Regina is still singing her whisper-song and there are two hands on hers and two locked on each other over the baby’s back.

 

Selena opens her eyes a crack, and they’re blue and green like the ocean barely visible out the window.


End file.
